Can astronauts phone home whenever they want?

NASA Flight Director Holly Ridings tells us how astronauts on the ISS make contact with Earth.

comments

NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg looks upon the Earth from the ISS in 2008.

All About Space
Do astronauts on the ISS have a phone to make calls?

Holly Ridings
“Yes, they actually have an IP phone, which works functionally through a computer. It’s kind of like ‘Space Skype’. They can call any phone in the world if they have the right satellite coverage. That helps them stay in connection with their families and their friends as well as the people they work with. And then they have these regularly scheduled meetings with their families where they can get video as well. So there’s lots of different ways that we communicate with them on a daily basis.”

Holly Ridings works as a Flight Director in NASA’s Mission Control Center.

All About Space
Do they need permission to make a call?

Holly Ridings
[Laughs] “Nope! They’re allowed to call out whenever they want. That’s one of the great things about the ISS, that they do have freedom to live a normal life even though they’re flying on a space station. When you’re assigned as a Flight Director to the crew that’s living on the ISS they’ll call you all the time! So you’re carrying your phone around and it’ll ring and it’ll be the space station. It’s really actually kind of cool, it never gets old. I mean I’ve been doing this for 15 years and it’s still really cool to have the space station call you.”

All images courtesy of NASA

To read our full interview with NASA Flight Director Holly Ridings, where we chat about everything from Mission Control to SpaceX, check out All About Space issue 13, on sale now.